Anthony Giddens: The Last Modernist by Stjepan Mestrovic PDF

Anthony Giddens is arguably the world's top sociologist. during this debatable contribution to the Giddens debate, Stjepan Mestrovic takes up and criticizes the key subject matters of his paintings - really the idea that of 'high modernity' rather than 'postmodernity' and his tried development of a 'synthetic' culture in keeping with human organization and constitution. checking out Giddens' theories opposed to what's occurring within the actual international from genocide in Africa to close secession in Quebec, Mestrovic discerns within the development of artificial traditions now not the promise of freedom held out via Giddens yet quite the ominous capability for brand spanking new types of totalitarian keep an eye on.

Rethinking questions of id, social organization and nationwide association, Bhabha offers a operating, if arguable, thought of cultural hybridity - one who is going a ways past prior makes an attempt through others. within the position of Culture, he makes use of ideas equivalent to mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural creation is often most efficient the place it truly is so much ambivalent.

Reviewing the pictures and meanings of the mass-mediated international, Gabriel Weimann examines the symbolic atmosphere, the place truth and fiction are nearly inseparable. via dialogue of mass-mediated photographs of individuals, cultures, struggle, love, intercourse, loss of life, neighborhood, and identification, he demonstrates that there's usually a wide hole among fact and the reconstruction of "realities" as communicated through the mass media.

The vampire and the zombie, the 2 most well-liked incarnations of the undead, are introduced jointly for a forensic severe research in Screening the Undead. either have an extended historical past in renowned fiction, movie, tv, comics and video games; the vampire additionally is still crucial to pop culture at the present time, from literary 'paranormal romance' to cult television and film franchises - through turns romantic, tortured, ugly, countercultural, a goth icon or lonely outsider.

It is true that at times, and especially in his The Constitution of Society (1984), The Nation-State and Violence (1987), and The Consequences of Modernity (1990), Giddens provides a rather stark critique of modernity. Specifically, he presents modernity as a juggernaut, addresses the crisis of ontological insecurity brought on by the rise of reflexivity, exposes the rise of surveillance, and analyzes other modern phenomena. Yet I intend to show that despite this apparent gloss of criticism, Giddens is a modernist.

But the distinctively modernist tendency in Giddens’s theory is that it is as imperialist as Parsons’s theory: both thinkers try to develop a single theory to encompass all other attempts at social theory, and both thinkers stay on the rational Enlightenment-based trajectory of cognition and rationality as the unifying element. : 7). Giddens’s theory is totalizing despite its postmodern gloss. : 11). Dallmayr in a critique incorporated in Giddens’s book, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (1982a: 18–27).

These and other examples constitute more than an uneasy mesh with pluralism and globalization. They can be construed as serious ruptures in the modernist project and serious eruptions of nationalism that threaten the existence of the modernist nation-state. It could be that modernity has expired or is about to expire, and the world is, indeed, entering a phase in which centripetal processes will dominate, and “rational control” (whatever that is) is obsolete. This horrifying scenario was foreshadowed long before the postmodernists by Arnold Toynbee (1978), Oswald Spengler ([1926] 1961), and Pitirim Sorokin (1957), among others.